Liechtensteiner!

Adam Night Owl Books - or An Arch Key Books. The used storefront is unprepossessing, unreveletory. Door. Library cart of books for a dollar, most of them crap. Dusty, weather-drenched, weather-transfigured oriental rug for people to wipe the mud from their boots before going inside. The rug crawls under the door. The door rings bells for whoever enters: here, here, a customer! Night Owl - or anarchy - Books is on a corner and lower than street level. There is a big step inside. There are bigger steps into what appears to be the 'main body' of the shop (or at least one section of the shop) to the right. This is the section that has windows on the street. The windows are full of: a clothing line above displayed books, pinned to which are advertisements for art shows or writer's workshops or retreats or concerts, most of them old, some of them new. Buttons of a philosophical nature: tongue-in-cheek, sharp, biting. Boxes of postcards. Fascimile pages from this folio or that. The right section of the shop is full of low bookshelves and aisles, a rickety wooden chair, a step-ladder. The left section of the shop is where the shelves get high: where some of them are glass-doored, are locked up, lock and key, where some of the finer stuff is to be found. The left section of the shop also gives way to a staircase, the banister old and scarred, which sneaks upwards and curves out've sight. It leads to the second floor, where there is - and it must be no surprise - more books to be found. There is a table. The table has a pyramid of books. The books that are sub-culture orientated: art books, a Polish grafitti artist's work, a shocking work of photography, exerpts of Henry Darger's magnum opus, how to make a bomb. If one is standing just inside the door, toward the back of the store, not quite straight on (more to the right), but nearly - there is a desk. The desk has a register and, just now, a mint-green typewriter, and a series of wires, and it is somewhat caged-in on the sides by boxes of unsorted books. Behind the desk is a door that is closed which says 'employees only' in fading gold cursive on a wooden plaque a museum poster circa the 1970s depicting some Renaissance work of art plastered there-upon. To the left of the desk there is a wall. The wall has a window in it. The window looks at what you'd reach if you didn't go up the stairs but followed the bookcases back into a little room full of works with a more occult or classical bent. It still isn't the rare stuff. Not really. That stuff is kept elsewhere. Internet business is where it's at for places like this. It's nice that they still have a presence, isn't it? And the proprietess of Night Owl Books has enjoyed being a supporter of local authors and artists, has thrown signing parties, has let old punks in to read and made them coffee at 2 am in the morning, sometimes at 4 am, which is not usually a time when Night Owl Books is open (but sometimes it is - it IS that kind of shop), so for those who know about the used bookshop, who visit it on and off, well: They like it. It smells like words. Like forests pressed into service of eternity. The proprietess has been gone for a month and her nephew has taken over shop. Her nephew? Her nephew. He isn't much to write home about: not he. He is essentially Mysterious, slightly Unknowable, an Arcane thing, with a tousled-up mop of hair most people can't agree on: Dark? What? And eyes of - some color. They had a conversation with him and it was - about this thing. That thing, next time they think about it. Maybe they don't. He's fine. He's reading a book at the desk, absorbed. The knight esconced in his forest of ink-and-paper, word-forest, book-wood. Music is playing. Swan Lake. Leonhard There's a shrillness to the man's glances, quite at odds with what could otherwise be described as a handsome face. Checking that nobody else appears to be approaching the shop, the glances flit left, right, left again... and then he enters the bookshop, as comfortable as his patience will allow. There is a Consor to find, and all the better that it be in private. If anybody's coming in shortly after him, they're not somebody he's seen either following or waiting. He stops in the doorway, the glance changed to a warm flitter of the eyes about the interior. Bringing the door softly - even politely - closed behind himself, a smile seems to have found root on his face. Yes, this would be the place, it's fuller character now revealed to him. Avoided for ten years but known from outside, known from conversation with others, known but never entered. About damn time. He carries a need in him, this one. Not so much a hunger, though his eyes pick with notable taste (and prejudice) at the shop's content. Is it mere politesse, his quiet lack of true interest in much of the stock on display. A mild glance to those nooks and crannies of the interior in which the treasure perhaps sits beneath dragons? Still, there it is in the way he, however politely, disregards all but the more esoteric titles as he moves into the shop. A need for something else... A need that his polite mannerisms do little to hide. Indeed, he seems... open. Unguarded to some degree. Practiced, perhaps, at feigning comfort? He's certainly not there for the books, though their presence - and the suggestion of yet more, of rarer character - clearly pleases him. There, one would find suggestion of the Arcane, but moreso it is in his pace. For all the promise of the hidden, the esoteric, even the dangerous, his is the pace of the magus whose feet have carried him in the grandest of libraries... Clearly, there is no Sally to be found. Not immediately, nor perhaps any time soon. He thinks of the incident in another such shop. Taken over by the Syndicate in the wake of the Storm, he had blundered in... to be fair, in the heat of altruism... and only evaded the inevitable by pretending to have been looking for pornography of the most esoteric stripe. And that had happened after five months of not being there between visits. This was the first time he had entered this shop, sought this Consor, been faced with this young man... (I was that young once, before...) His fingers flicker awake. Swan Lake invites them to play notes upon the air, as if a piano perhaps. No. Not a piano. A harpsichord. "Would Sally be around?" The accent is thick with the Alps, however fitful in its ease with English. He asks this, then seems, should Adam glance up from his book, a little amused. I was that young once, and I was magus.... Adam [Boom! Percept + Aware on the old decripit guy. -1.] Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 3 ) Leonhard [Hola! Per+Awareness on the foetal charmer.] Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) Leonhard [[For 'Sally' in the above posts, please do read 'Sarah'. An OOC mistake taken IC. Leonhard knows the name properly. WhitBloke made him say it, but he meant Sarah..]] Adam The bells ring for Leonhard. Their voice is not the silver of bells of another age: hey, hey, a scion of the Order of Hermes is here! The Tower has sent its representative! There is nothing elphin about the sound of them. They're little children compared to those hypothetical other bells: giggling, tugging on the sleeve of Adam's attention. Adam looks up from his book. This is: not all that usual a thing, when the bells ring. He isn't worried about thieves. He isn't worried about helping customers, either. They'll ask, or he'll be bored and he'll ask. But this time the man who pauses on the threshold has that something - inspirational, something like a good support; something that makes Adam think of being bolstered, of O heaven the fire of invention. Another Willworker. So Adam looks up from his book. He puts his book down when Leonhard approaches. There is a pen on the desk, too, next to the typewriter, and a journal for jotting notes. The pen is a good one, expensive, of some bloody red wood with a silver nib: suitable for an Ace of Wands, a Knight of Wands. He, leaning his forearms on the desk's edge, takes it up with his left hand, twirling it as if for something to do. His expression is curious, perhaps - but he's so reserved. "Sorry, no." He sometimes has the ghost of another accent, too. But it isn't an accent that belongs anywhere. It's the accent of someone who belonged to one Nation, but was dragged through other Nations for most of his formative years. Creeps in sometimes, especially when confronted with An Accent. "Just got hitched. She's gone touring the world for a while and left me in charge. Are you a friend of hers?" Adam. To Leonhard's senses, the shadowless young man's signature, that spark-seed contained that says Willworker, I Work My Will, feels: valiant, relentless; conjures up a sense of swords or armor flashing in the light ceaselessly, impaccably. Leonhard "Never met her, and I doubt she'd know me. Which would rather make me appear odd for asking after her but for the inherent, ah, associations. Well, far be it from me to exercise good timing," he mentions of her absence.Swan Lake continues to animate the fingers on his left hand but his right draws up and moves towards Adam, offering to shake. As tangible as his hand is, there is the Resonance of the man. Inspirational, though quietly so. Supportive, though perhaps simple less so... at least in this environment, however comfortable he appears. "Leonhard Frick. We've not met, either, but I suspect we know each other a little already." Adam Pas de trois. Allegro. Triumphal, with an edge of darkness. That's what animates Leonhard's fingers and makes them remember music. The dark-haired young man (Magus) twirls his pen [wand] more slowly when Leonhard offers his own hand. He doesn't hesitate when he takes it. He is even-keeled, is Adam - or appears to be. Even-keeled, self-contained, self-assured - it's all in the handshake too. By the end of that, the pen is stilled in the fingers of his other hand, the sharp nib of it ink-kissed and pointing southward. Leonhard suspects that they know each other a little already. Adam - pensive-eyed, clearly bemused - says, "Suspect is such a nasty word. You're never a suspect without the stain of guilt somewhere on your person, even if your hands are clean as soap. Odder ducks have asked after my aunt, don't worry." A beat. "You're practicing, too. I'm Kit. Pull up a, erm, well we do have seats around here, or ah, an office, if you'd like to go talk..." Adam finally stands, and that bemusement seems to grow stronger when he looks around, because he seems to have missplaced the stools or chairs or whatever it is he can offer somebody else. That, or they've turned into boxes. "I'd say in privacy, but," a smile that sends wrinkles around his eyes and down his cheeks, not quite but almost carving out a dimple. He's got an animated face when he chooses to animate it. Goes very still on that but, but flicks his eyes around. Holds up one finger. Says, clearly, "Cricket, cricket." They are alone. Leonhard One performance of welcome deserves another, of course.... The Jerbiton's warmth deepens. Practicing. Such a good word for it. Yes, a good word, and met with a smile, even as he welcomes Adam's offer with one (if less acute) of his own... "Practicing. At Pymander. Still. Quite the cornucopia," he notes pleasantly of the shop. "Now and then, I have suggested to clients that they pop in. I run a creative retreat. Pasaran. Up in Nederland. Won't bore you about it. Just hoped to meet Sarah at last. Sent plenty of my clients here. Pick up a good book, you might pick up on a good thought, right? Myself, I've been concentrating... well, once again concentrating... on the Neo-Platonists. Particularly Proclus. Vaduz... Oh, the accent's Liechtenstein.... in case you were wondering.... Where was I? Oh, yes. Proclus? Vaduz! Vaduz used to have quite the most labyrinthine bookshop. Such rich variety, much like yourself here. I miss the place but I'm here now. Oh. I'm rambling, aren't I?" For the duration of the rambling, the visitor effects a seamlessly natural routine of hand gestures, smiles, even a twirl to once again take the shop in better. All carried on warm tones. All rather affable. All rather honest, too, though the rambling ends rather suddenly. An austerity of motion dawns across his body. There is a bow, ever so slight yet honest. "Yes. Proclus Vaduz bani Jerbiton." The eyes appear to have grown tired of the shop, and their brown rests upon Adam. "I am extremely pleased to find the Sarah leaves her stock in the hands of one who might lend it evermore strongly than even she towards the City of Pymander. A seat would be lovely, but I had no intention of interrupting any magus' studies when I came." Adam Leonhard rambles. Adam listens. As Adam listens, he watches Leonhard. There isn't anything hard about the watching, nothing edged, nothing sharp -- nothing malicious, at least. Nothing dark. Nothing calculating, but perhaps something in that statement isn't quite true. Adam's attention once given does have an edge, becomes a fixed point, a keenness, and when Leonhard conjures up Pymander, Adam is startled into pleasure. It looks like a grin, boyish, tinged in surprise, as radiant as any young man's grin ever is. But Adam is far too contained to grin pleasure for long, so after that oh! I see! grin! he listens to the rest of Leonhard's full greeting with a measured intentness, that -- But wait no. Proclus Vaduz Liechtenstein Labyrinthine. The shadowless man grows still indeed, standing on the other side of that desk. Poised, understand, spine straightening instinctually. Serious. He's a serious thing, Adam. "Can't interrupt what never ceases, can you? Can't stop the tide by stepping in it. You knew my,--" a pause. "Erm, I know you." Flush-up-the-neck. "I know of you, that is. I'm Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass bani Bonisagus. Adam, here in Denver, to most of the Awakened community. You knew my mater." He doesn't give her name yet; cautious. Leonhard That a Consor of the Order might leave or otherwise trust her wares in the hands of a Magus - that much was a pleasing surprise, though in all fairness to probability not such a surprise. More a hope revealed after the fact. That he might happen into the company of a magus of the First House...There grows the tear. So soon after Adam's neck had flushed, something had wrought a tear in the brown of his eyes. Perhaps he is so flattered after his little routine to be recogn... No. Bonisagus. The mention of the First House. "Dominic Adam Julian Gallowglass, magus of the First House, it is such... Oh it's such a pleasure to meet you. Such a... joy, in fact." He looks as if he might clamber over the desk and fling some manner of clumsy hug but he restrains himself. For all his emotion now, his motion remains economical, remains austere. "But, I suppose the joy is more mine. I'm afraid I can't think who your mater may be. I've been Interdicted for a decade and... I suppose that's where you might know my name. I'm not here to threaten, though I should think you've already taken that as true. Wait. I'm being a dolt, aren't I? You're saying... Are you saying your mater is somebody I know from... Not Elyssa of Bern! Oh, you're Elysse's? I thought she only trained girls. How is Elysse?" Adam A hug? Adam does not look as if he would enjoy a hug. He looks far too dignified for hugs. He looks far too self-possessed for hugs. He looks too serious - solemn, even. He rubs his chin (or the beard - yes, why not just say it: he strokes his chin) and there is leashed amazement there. Leashed something, anyway. Now, he hasn't tensed, or drawn away, he is just - still. Until this: a shake of his head. He puts the pen (wand [oh, we have our symbols, don't we?]) down on the desktop, and then rakes those fingers through his hair. "No," reflective. "Not - Elyssa. Do you mean Elyssa Diana? No. I mean Arethusa." How closely he watches Leonhard, who has been out of the world for ten years. "Arethusa Thessaly Plantagent." Leonhard "Elyssa Diana, yes, yes," comes the rapid nodding. Elyssa Diana! She of the rampantly apolitical research, coming as it does in fits and starts. Hardly a bad poet in her youth, too.... Oh. Wait. Another name. Another topic and tone entirely...."Arethusa Thessaly Plantagent bani Bonisagus. A formidable maga, and a formidable woman besides." The name weighs heavily on his memory, and sparks a sorrow, a sympathy. "I remember her pain perhaps better than our conversations, not that we shared many. There's me, waffling about Diana the Dy... uh, Elyssa. What is it?"He leans on the desk, which had hitherto perhaps been the only thing to bar his flying hug, closer to the Bonisagan. He blinks, steadily, but briefly. (This magus is witch-touched. Where is his shad.... Leave it. Arethusa....) "She and I were both interested in the Storm, though I think I'd be flattering myself unduly if I suggested I could have truly been much help to her. Still... She did seek me out. I hope what I had to tell her has been of use to her." Serafíne Awareness - Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1 Serafíne And Awareness-of-Adam Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (5, 6, 6, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1 Adam [Well then!] Leonhard [[Sorry. For. The. Slow. Awareness+Perception.]] Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 6, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 ) Adam "She told me." The warp and weft of his expression changes. Nuanced. Subtle. He has realized something, and the realization has his shoulders rising, falling, and he stops ruffling his hair so that it is an owl's feathered nest of mayhem. What is it? Leonhard says. Adam, after a beat, replies with this: "Your ten years is up. Have you contacted any of your old friends? Or was Sarah," he is so solemn!, "your first step?" Pas de deux: Intrada. Tempo di valse. A waltz? Something sweeping, to dance to. Adam [Er, yes, also Perc + Awareness, is a Sera this way coming?] Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 7, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Leonhard Drop it. Politely."Sarah was on the list. Got a bit crumpled over the last ten years, but she was always somebody to seek out. Well, once I got back from the Greater Alps Tribunal. You know how Primi are. Went to see Andros, reconnect, find a lot of people have moved to the caves of the Mundane world. Pity. Not a lot of building been done those ten years. Must be quite frustrating for you, coming into things after such a... you know... Everything that befell us. It's a criminal shame. An opinion I share with Garrett. Met him, heard about other magi, but he didn't ment.... Hold on."So something will shut him up when he gets going... and he looks concerned, looking to the door and back to the Bonisagan. "Cricket, cricket," he mutters. Serafíne Something in the winter night. Like AM signals on the radio, their fucking resonance is all amplified and Sera feels them from a block and a half away and Adam, well, he can sense her before she's turned some negligible corner far, far away. Which is to say: they've warning. Warning before the bells on the inside of the front door chime that they will soon be joined by a third, who feels, see, like instinct, bone-deep and gut-wrench, and the borders-of-things, the places where names fall away, after the old is torn down, before the new is remade, and something else - addictive maybe, compelling, enthralling too. It is a Sera. She's wearing leather, rather naturally. A rather tiny skirt that the bottom third of which consists of these interlocking metal rings rather than actual fabric. Long bare legs beneath that end in a pair of the most extraordinarily wicked looking heels, covered in fucking sharp spikes, like some medieval goddamned mace has been morphed into shoes. A torn Ramones t-shirt (white) over a black lace bra clearly visible through the thin cotton, beneath a black leather jacket lined in shearling. She is carrying a stuffed bunny. She has come to see Ruse. Serafíne (Oh my these shoes: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m02jihB15n1qmifsro1_500.jpg are the shoes. :) ) Leonhard Those aren't just shoes. Those are proof of premeditation in a court of law. :) Leonhard She is carrying a stuffed bunny.Moving aside should he have been blocking Adam's view of the door, Leonhard slips one hand into his moleskin jacket. The other remains on the desk, once again fidgeting along with Swan Lake. He smiles to the newer visitor, reminded of his own business' clients and patrons but clearly waiting for Adam's lead to follow in the absence of outright assault. MIBs don't carry bunnies. Much. Adam Adam's House is a House of loners, in some (many) respects. Far-flung, missing, lost-in-books, lost-in-theory, lost. They are Tower-mages, Knights-in-Towers, Frozen-in-Towers, barriers between them and the 'real' world. Sarah was on the list. Adam nods, infinitessimal thing, and though the realization is still there like the sound of a bell deep-struck in the waves informing his expression, it is not a surface-thing. "You'll like her. Most people do," he admits this last thing: confesses it. Hold on, Leonhard says, and Cricket, Cricket, and Adam: Oh, he feels it too. He does. Feels it even before the bells sing out her name, hot woman (essentially hot, innately hot) in leather, with - of course a stuffed animal. He didn't feel that in advance but he isn't surprised. Is he? Maybe he is a little. Bewildered. That's it. He's a touch bewildered, but says with good grace - " - that's Serafíne. And I didn't say this before, but it is a pleasure - " a curious intensity in this aside; maybe that's where his shadow has gone? To feed that fire " - to meet you." Serafíne Sera is a little bit drunk tonight. Maybe; she's a little bit something tonight but Adam has met her once and Leonhard knows her not at all so he can hardly be expected to assess the looseness of her body language and the fact that the faint hint of tobacco-and-cloves in her hair means that she has been doing more than merely smoking clove cigarettes tonight. Though she has been doing that too. But yes: a rather young, rather hot, rather innately and elementally hot, woman with a little black clutch in one hand the handle of which is formed to resemble both brass knuckles and a skull-and-crossbones with black crystals for eyes. Tattoos visible on her hands; the palm and wrist of the left, the edge of the palm on the right. More would be visible on her arms but she is wearing a coat. It is winter. Sera has the bunny tucked into the lapel of her coat and it is rather small though larger than Adam's adolescent ferret. She waves her fingers as she walks in the door. Gives Leonhard a once-over that shifts to Adam, after. Adam who just seems to slide back into her consciousness when she glances at him. Sera didn't really remember his eyes. She sort of clomps through the front room of the store to the other pair. In those shoes she cannot really do anything but clomp. Take a wrong sort of step and she could open up a vein and bleed out on the hardwood. "He's gonna think I'm stalking him," says Sera to Leonhard, and her pupils are rather large, even given that it is nighttime without. Says it like she's confiding a secret, with a sliding, liquid sort of grin. " - but mostly I came to see Ruse." Leonhard "Made my week," the Jerbiton offers upon Adam's mention of their own meeting. "But now I'm feeling spoilt. I came looking for a Sarah and I meet a Serafine. You run an amazing shop." The words, if mildly clumsy, are rinsed free of any hint of smugness or seedy attempts at masculine charm. Both hands once again visible, the tension lifts from him and he stands easily. He looks to Adam, warmly, but turns to Serafine as she talks. "I wish I could help you, I really do, but I tend to point people in the direction of Muse, and I doubt the two are on speaking terms. Which I suppose is a pity." He can't help a glance at the shoes. Leonhard [[sorry, should have found a way to emphasise the 'I' in "I wish -I- could help you..." He's friendly, not narcissistic!]] Adam He is still touched by a certain gravity; reserve. But he smiles slightly. He usually smiles slightly, and the slight smile is usually enough to (gently) transfigure. There might've been an almost-chuckle there, too, lodged behind his adam's apple. Which I suppose is a pity. Adam also can't help a glance at the shoes. From an outside perspective, perhaps it's a touch comical: the unconscious mirroring that goes on. "Ruse can't come out to play, I'm afraid. Is the bunny for him? He'll tear it up in two minutes." Adam [I also should have been clear. He's deigning to almost-chuckle at Leonhard's line AND Sera's line. Amusement for all. (grin)] Serafíne Charlotte goes still when Erich reaches for her belt loop and she's not really gettinganywhere because Melantha is holding on to her hand so she hasn't really gotten far. Just off the bed, snagged in two locations, right? Pinned to the hear and now. She is quite remarkably still at first, Charlotte, and a stranger who does not see the animal in her might read this stillness as a prey-thing; a rabbit shivering against the snow; a mouse remembering the shadow of a hawk soaring over the meadow. Except there are no strangers here, just Erich and Melantha and they are her pack, and as breakable and crystalline as Charlotte is, she is also a wolf, a wolf-girl, a girl-and-wolf, who collects fingerbones and brainpans and unconventional, nobby, gnarled teeth of fallen foes with which to make a necklace, a circlet, a halo. There is violence vivid beneath her skin and her stillness is as much the alert alarum of a pack-creature brought to the Alpha's attention prematurely; wary and sharp and still. Charlotte glances at Erich's face and pulls herself up quiet and short, but settled enough that he can feel confident she's not about to bolt. Not immediately about to bolt, at any rate. "I don't - " Charlotte frowns; she lets go of Melantha's hand and brings her arms in close and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans and pulls her shoulders in tight, this slouching incurve defining her shoulders-and-neck that makes her look entirely adolescent. "I don't like it when you fight. Sometimes it makes my head hurt and I don't know what to say. And you - " Her brows knit, "I don't want you to fight. I don't like it when you feel bad, either." Her breathing's a bit sharper, faster. "Maybe you can talk better when I'm not here." Serafíne (ARGH. Apologies. I am MTing. here is the real post.) Serafíne "Hi." This is Sera rather directly to Leonhard, as if she had just-now-noticed him standing at the desk or the counter or what the fuck ever. See? Her mouth spreads in a close-lipped but rather generous and assuredly-slightly-altered smile. "I am actually also Sera." The first vowel's a bit different, throat-closed rather than the bright and open air of Sarah but Serafíne seems rather delighted by the fucking symmetry at play. And she's about to ask Leonhard who he is and where he might direct her were she in search of Muse but Adam tells her that 1. Ruse can't come out to play; and 2. He would tear up Bunny and Sera looks mildly horrified at the thought and rather defensive of the threadbare stuffed rabbit she's carrying so thoughtlessly around and then they are both glancing down at her shoes and so of course she does, too, lifting up her right foot and turning it this way and that way so that they can admire the running gleam of light along the spikes. "Aren't they awesome? A bitch to stumble over them in the middle of the night and you can't get past airport security with the fucking things, but otherwise, awesome. Oh, hey. Was I interrupting something?" Leonhard There is a clear softness to the man when he notes the horror visiting Sera/fine upon the news of Ruse (a pet? a Familiar...?) tearing into the bunny. But it duly evaporates into the mist of agreeable whimsy that washes over him as she shows off her footwear. "Leonhard," comes the name, almost incidentally as he admires the bravado of the shoes, clomp or no. "But, no, I wouldn't say so. And even if you were, you do so.... well..." He looks to Adam. It's not his roof to speak under, after all, but he ventures to end his comment, "You did bring a dash of fun through the door." Leonhard "But I suspect it's me that's interrupting," he admits aloud, looking to Adam. "I'll be meditating upon this meeting. I had best leave you to.... ah... Well, it's been a wholly pleasurable venture, coming in at last. Serafine. Adam."There is a reluctance, but an affability. A manner of manners, if brisk. Leonhard [[Sorry for double-post. Realised it's nearly 5am here now. Damn.]] Serafíne OOC: No apologies! I hadn't realized you were in England (?). That is very late. By the way, my AIM is istioname. hopefully we will be able to play again. Thank you for allowing me to crash! Leonhard [[Way I'm looking at it, I've enjoyed a very, very enjoyable scene thanks to Adam's Boss and got the added bonus of IC meeting an Ecstatic, which will delight Leonhard when he gets to reflect upon it. (Very pleased you crashed, as you put it.) Hope the scene continues well for you both. Shan't just log out. Will post properly.]] Adam "Nobody is interrupting," Adam says (decrees [a regal little beast, isn't he?]), firmly. Rubs his forehead across his forehead, and he has been standing - standing since before Serafíne stepped through the door, just on the other side of his desk. Now he touches one of the typewriter's keys, pushing down idle-y so the bullet-rapport snap of key bites down and punctuates the backdrop. "And they look difficult. Your shoes, that is. For jumprope and erm. Things." He is - well. He looks up from Serafíne's shoes - looks up, away, from the iron maiden-y spikes - and back at his Tradition-mate. Reluctant to see him go? Perhaps. He keeps it contained, though his neck flushes again - and whatever expression is in his eyes is a distant thinking-thoughts-that-are-elsewhere sort of expression. "Come by again soon, Leonhard. Erm, take a card." An owlish blink, and he pats himself down absently until he finds the card he meant as a bookmark in the book he was reading, profers it. Serafíne "They're brilliant for curb-stomping and roasting marshmallows." Sera reports, sanguine. Sanguine? No; there's a degree of bemusement that could feel sly if she weren't so damned open about everything. Still, when she informs Adam, "I'd take them off to jumprope, though," she does so with a degree of solemnity that feels almost self-aware. "For sure." "I actually," Sera/fíne has tucked bunny away for the nonce in the warmth of her jacket, snug up against Joey-Ramone's screen-printed left elbow and some of his wild mop of hair. And she's continuing this all conversationally, almost confidingly, to Leonhard, as if there were eight year old girls sharing a secret while in the lunch line, "have a bustier that matches. Fucking covered in spikes. You could really hurt someone with that. "That's a weird-ass name," says the girl who tells people to call her by one of the names of the fucking heavenly host, but she says it with this supple wash of a grin and a dark eyed look that takes away any sting and finishes its circuit in a rather lopsided fashion. She says it rather admiringly, all told, and probably in the same tone of voice she used to ask a priest whether or not he wanted to make out with her in one of his confessionals, her first proper night in Denver. "I can't figure out if it's just old-fashioned or like fucking Austro-Hungarian or something. "Either way, it was cool to meet you. I'm sure we'll run into each other again, soon." That's just the way it happens, isn't it? Leonhard "I'll trade you," he chirrups, producing a card of his own in exchange. Pasaran. Creative Retreat. "And perhaps you'll do me the favour of a visit. Let me show off some Jerbiton hospitality and lap up talk of whatever you might be working on." There is a momentary return to the austerity of motion. Deliberated movement, arguably prim, possibly in danger of being labelled pure affectation, but unguarded for all that. He nods, and breathes an almost-bow to the Bonisagan.But the formality is gone in a beat, in turning to Serafine, and most particularly to her relaxed comments on her bustier. "You know, I might be able to picture that better after a drink." Although it is a rather overt and almost certainly unexpected move to make, Leonhard, offers a hand to Serafine (and Bunny), Swan Lake still playing, and a pure playfulness in him for a moment. Then the obvious returns to mind. "Ah, no, almost asked you to dance me out, but I think I prefer my dancing feet free of perforation. Next time. I shall hold you to it." In embellishing his reluctant departure, however, he does manage a laudibly rhythmic dance (to Swan Lake) in the direction of the door. There is a lightness in his step. Certainly, they aren't the same feet that brought him into the shop to begin with. I came looking for a Sarah and I have found a Serafine... and a fellow of the Order. "Made my week," he can be heard to say after bowing at the door and disappearing off into whatever night might suffer his risen mood. Leonhard Although.... he can be heard... his accent in full presence, almost joyful... calling, from wherever he has gone, "It's Liechtensteiner!" Leonhard Coudn't resist that last line. Thanks again, Jess! Good meeting Serafine. Must scene-up again soon, I hope. All the best! Serafíne OOC: hee. Absolutely. (grins) Thank you! and hopefully, yes. Soon. :) Adam An almost-bow, the suggestion of formality -- Adam returns it with a nod. Subtle. And that is where all his shadow has gone, into those kinds of subtleties. Leonhard's card gets tapped against the register, then finds itself -- as many stray bits of paper do -- a bookmark in one of Adam's books. He does not become playful, our serious (pensive [distant]) cavalier of words. He smiles faintly; that thoughts-are-elsewhere remove stays, even and up until the other Hermetic dances. Then he laughs. Adam's got one of those shoulder-hunch laughs that requires him to actually lean forward, before making some gesture with his bony wrists, something that's like holding the laughter in because of course one shouldn't let laughter get out. "Do you have any pears?" Adam asks Sera. Adam [AND THEN WE FIGURED OUT THEIR TRUE BEGINNING. DUNDUNDUNNN.]

Ruses [Unfinished]

Adam

The shop's facade is unprepossessing. The shop itself is low to the ground and in its windows some less expensive stock. Photographs. Postcards. A box with a painting of dancing bears, an old tin, a tapestried pillow more books. A clothing line above books on display in the window, pinned to the line a felt board full of buttons and a poster for art shows that have come and gone or are coming and getting ready to go, fascimile pages dredged up from some musical folio, a political cartoon.

The bookstore is really two bookstores. The antiquarian bookstore which deals in the rarest of volumes and has a definite bias toward volumes with an occult theme (but some of that stuff is too rare to be out and so it is in the back), and there are shelves behind glass, locked up closely, and even the books which are not so rare and so old they require special treatment tend to be on esoteric topics; and the other bookstore, which specializes in books about and by fringe cultures and fringe art movements, art books and glossy books on the history of photography. There is a sizable collection of cheap detective stories and of science fiction from the 70s.

Inside: aisles. Corners. Tall shelves. Low shelves. A table with a pyramid of art books, every square inch of a wall full of something, even if here and there it's a doodle. Local zines. A bench. Another room downstairs, take a step to get into it, older books, cloth-bound, glass-caged, and a door going somewhere. Stairs going upstairs, to the half-room loft above the bookstore's mainfloor. The railing for that staircase is old and wobbly, glows a pale amber. A desk on the first floor, somewhere to the back, past the first of the honey-combed rooms (small window so whoever's at the desk can see into that room, except it's mostly covered in files), and at that desk a typewriter mint-green.

The typewriter has a page in it, and the sound of somebody at the typewriter is a recent phenomena, but somebody is instead at this moment cursing and looking for something on the floor behind the desk, just this hump of a moving back.

He isn't very noticeable, this somebody. He's innately, essentially Mysterious; it gives him an edge in camoflauge situations. The shop is otherwise empty.

Serafíne

Perception + Awareness minus three dice damnit

Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Adam

Valiant and relentless, the flash of a sword, of armor, determined and unwavering; courage, courage: this is what the mage in his tower of books and ink words feels like to the keen and the canny.

Serafíne

Who knew that an antiquarian bookstore would be open at a quarter past eleven on a warm Tuesday night but here it is and here she is and here they are. Sera does not keep regular hours. Sometimes Sera keeps Odd hours but she prefers to catch and release the regular ones, to let them go back into the stream.

Is there a bell? There must be a bell, a hello you have another customer bell, the old fashioned sort with a tinny little clapper connected to the frame of the door with a worn leather strap. So Hello You Have a Customer and the customer is poking about in the next room, browsing but not the way one browses for books. Browsing the way one browses for things-that-are-not-books but still live-in-bookstores.

Somehow she still manages to pick up two things to buy before she is half-way across the room. One is a picture book of bawdy and fantastical poems and the other is a somewhat beaten-up second hand glossy of a Polish graffiti artist's most enduring works. The hump of a not-very-noticeable back against the bright and certain shine of the resonance Sera knows that she can feel and co-locate and not long after the bell and all that there's a shadow and there's a young woman and she's leaning over the desk to see perhaps what the hump of a back is looking for.

"Everything okay down there?"

--

Sera is Noticeable. She smells like cloves and smoke and whiskey and it is warm tonight in Denver and she is wearing very little in the way of clothing and much of it is leather. Possibly the world's shortest leather skirt made of strops and buckles that barely covers her ass and a black leather bustier, the shape of which is outlined in somewhat wicked looking silver spikes and okay a black hoodie over that because it is warm but not warm enough to walk around with 9/10 of one's skin exposed and the hood is pulled up over the crown of her head and she has on these thigh-high tights are are opaque to above the knee where the solid black has been cut away to something like the skyline of Paris and she is wearing a gold ring on her right index finger and a leather cuff covered in spikes on her left wrist and both a rather large silver rose stud and a wicked looking silver spike through the lobe of her right ear and there are tattoos and other sundry and assorted markings on her skin and well,

let us just call her Noticeable.

Adam

[What's up, man? Do I notice The Thing That We All Check For Noticing?]

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

The woman in the room is between, isn't she. On the edge of. She is doorways and corridors and porticos and it is night and both ends are dark. She is not was or will be but the point of becoming when one is both nothing else and everything around, and that is still so new that Sera feels it between her back teeth and sometimes pauses in the doorways, at the entryway, and looks backward and looks forward and catches her breath and does not understand why or how she has caught it. And she is more than that, and this is richer and older and so entirely her that if feels like she has never been without it because she has never been without it in living memory.

In her living memory, anyway.

She is gut-wrenching, instinctive, all blood-and-bone, she is teeth set into one's skin, merely for the pleasure of it and she is fascinating, captivating. When she's around why would anyone ever look away?

Adam

He became aware of the unfamiliar resonance before it was at his door and in his shop. This sense to him of liminal spaces - of thresholds and betweenesses: gut-wrenchingly, enthrallingly, adverbily, potent - and there was a bell to herald her presence in his [aunt's] shop. 11 pm isn't a popular hour but Night Owl Books has the strangest of hours. Sometimes it keeps vampire-hours, hours-for-vampires, a place to go when the rest of the city is closed for business, and the cream-skinned proprietess with the sea-jewel eyes would pour coffee for the old punks who insomniacal were driven to Night Owl Books, and they'd smirk or listen to music (there is no music going in the shop right now; it is utterly quiet, except for the shuffle of Adam's knees against the floor, and something with tiny claws), and it's pretty sweet - sometimes it'd be cheap wine or cheap vodka, too - but that was Sarah. This is Adam, and he doesn't pour coffee for the old punks who are insomniacal in just the same way, and although by now a few of them have had whole conversations with Adam, they don't remember exactly what those conversations entailed or forget them and are surprised to be distantly reminded next time they come in and they've already met Adam, and so on, and so forth, because -

Serafíne with her needle-compass senses can find him. Dark hair, something eyes. They're also sea-jewel eyes but their colour won't stay in her mind if she stops thinking about them if she thinks about them at all. Same with his features. They're present but they don't stay, even though she finds him, even though she sees him, poking his Sandman wild tousle of a head out from behind the desk, a long-necked gawk of thing our pale-as-night-monsters-are Adam circles under his eyes, shadow of a beard on his jaw around his mouth trimmed neatly (or not?).

He looks Serafíne over: a rake of a gaze, which takes in the essential hotness, and leads to a cleared throat; a sweep of a gaze, which takes in resonance, and appearance, and becomes inscrutable and distant after that throat-clear.

The Cultist is peering over the desk, and Adam scrambles up without any sort of grace at all, especially given that he is using no hands. He is holding a ferret in his two hands, you see: little bandit-furred silver-and-brown thing, bright blinking eyes, sharp, sharp teeth, predatory little mouth.

Adam has a coat on, something that looks a little big on him because he's rather scrawny, truth told, something that has patches on it in a decidedly unfashionable way, and he tries to put the ferret in one of his pockets.

"Yes, yes, Ruse just desired to introduce his stomach to my shoe laces, and my shoe laces desire to stay on my shoes. Halloo," touch of an accent, whisper-whisper, thing, the ferret doesn't want to stay in his pocket and pokes its head out, sniffing in Sera's direction, "What've you got there?"

Chin nod to the books.

Serafíne

Already Sera can hardly remember him. He's so forgettable isn't he? Nothing to be remarked upon, just the taste of his resonance and the way if buffets her sixth sense has her doing a bit more than passing him over. Well, the taste of his resonance in the back of her throat and the presence of the fucking adorable baby (?) ferret in his hands.

"That thing," the stranger - whose hotness is not merely essential, but quite nearly elemental. So much a part of her that it seems to recede back into his skin - the strange is giving him this flash of a grin, more teeth than anything, peering over the desk as he straightens, her eyes fixed on Ruse with the startled fascination that belongs to someone who is not exactly an animal person, " - is it a rat? Or a fucking otter? It is fucking adorable.

"Is it gonna bite me if I pet it? Can I pet it?"

She won't remember his seaglass eyes or his mop of wild curls, not precisely, but the next time Sera decides to wander in the directions of this shop, she may remember to bring with her a small, somewhat threadbare stuffed bunny rabbit, the origins of which she cannot remember.

She's had it since she woke up.

Which was, unlike most of them, after she Woke Up.

---

Sera's smile is a quick slash. She's hardly paying attention to him and it all feels like an afterthought, the way she's mooning over that predatory little beast, all inquisitive and sharp-toothed and peeking out of his pocket. A glance at the books in her hand, she lifts them up to look at the spines.

"Oh, Dirty Beasts - Roald Dahl - and this other thing. I don't fucking know what it is, but the pictures look cool. I like poetry but otherwise I'm not really much of a reader. My friends, though.

"Grace told me about this place."

Adam

Ruse is a ferret and ferrets are escape artists. While Adam's attention is on Serafíne, and Serafíne's attention is on Ruse, Ruse -- the just-out-of-babyhood, so call it adolescent, masked ferret -- slithers out've Adam's pocket, one tiny clawed 'hand' reaching intently for the desk. Ruse is a slinky, a living slinky, and one of Adam's hands becomes a step for-to-reach the desk, then there's the little bump of its back as it makes for one of Adam's pens.

So. One of Adam's hands became a step for the ferret. How'd that happen? "Probably not," Adam had replied, to is it gonna bite me. "You'll never know unless you try," a certain dry humor, typical of Adam. He doesn't mind being an afterthought. An afterthought can study a person and take their measure without worrying about a mirror, reflecting back. He can feel Ruse trying to get out of his pocket, which is when he looks from Sera to his pocket, then puts a hand out to help the little guy.

"His name is Ruse." He's telling Sera the ferret's name as he's taking the books out of her hands, opening the covers, checking the pencilled in price -- unless of course some sort-of unexpected resistance crops up. But that would be unexpected. He'll need the pen Ruse is making for in a moment if he's going to write Sera a receipt for the books, which he is. Grace told Sera about this place. That causes the dark-haired young man to smile. The smile is subtle and reserved but it is still a thing which darkens his gaze and sends lines around his eyes into wakefulness and dredges out a pang of sunlight.

"Why, if you're not much of a reader? Is it someone's birthday, or is it to meet me?"

Ruse has acquired the pen.

Serafíne

They're at a desk, right? And the desk is likely covered with things that belong on a desk, like blotters and ink pens and receipts and order forms and clipboards and catalogues and mechanical pencils and the endless supply of highlighters that congregate wherever office supplies are to be found. There may also be books or perhaps books and books; stacks of books over stacks of books. It hardly matters, because the point is that even though the desk is likely serving its alotted purpose Sera is a skinny creature and more to the point she does not give a fuck. There is a delightful rat-otter thing entertaining her and a desk on which she can perch her skinny ass.

So, Sera makes space to sit on the desk, moves the books and gewgaws and whatnot with hands or hip, giving up her own two books without really a second thought. She just allows Adam to relieve her of them and draws up one long leg (this is an illusion; Sera looks like she's long and tall but that is merely something about the way she is made, the sleekness of her limbs, the proportions of her frame) and bends down to brace her left elbow on her left thigh and holds out her left hand, thumb and forefinger, for Ruse to sniff, or whatever the hell it is ferrets do.

Long blond curls slide over her left shoulder and spill toward the cluttered wood in coiling spirals.

"He's fucking adorable - " Sera is declaring again, and there is a little bit of babyfication to her talking-to-animals voice, but it all dissolves in the next moment as she lifts her chin and finds Adam's face without reservation and favors him with a grin as quick and sharp as the edge of a well-honed switchblade. "Did I say that already?"

A gleam.

"I think I said that already. Hello," back to Ruse, "Ruse. You are fucking adorable. I bet you know it, too."

Wiggling her fingers at the ferret as he seizes the pen, Sera glances up again. "Mostly I came because Grace mentioned it." A bit of a rather shameless shrug. "I like bookstores fine, though. I mean, I like the way they feel, you know? Plus I have friends who spend all their goddamned time reading. I'm Serafíne.

"Call me Sera."

Adam

He does not look like a man with a black temper. He does not look like a man who could easily lose control -- and Serafíne isn't looking at him. But the black temper flickers -- an up-surge, a shadow for the young man who has none. He leashes it before it can escape to wreak havoc although there is a tension to the jaw and the articulation of shoulders that was not there before. The cause: Serafíne plopping herself on his desk after making a space. He barely had time to realize what she was doing, much less stop her, so Adam shifts a few items himself, shooing her hands decidedly away without grabbing her wrist or anything too overtly aggressive.

Ruse does sniff Sera's fingers. Little sniff sniff sniffs, spine (elooongated) eloooongating, low to the desk, pen abandoned and taken up again, strangely finicky. Ruse gets close enough for Sera to feel the tickle of his breath and the tickle of his fine little whiskers and then Ruse rolls onto his back, looking bright-eyed at the woman. If she moves, Ruse flops over, more than ever like a slinky, as if prepared to do battle. And then rolls over again, with a funny little hump-bunch run.

"He does know it. Adam Gallowglass," Adam Gallowglass says, before plucking the ferret up, his long fingers a-circle behind the ferret's fore-paws. "Just Adam will do, of course. And I do know, about how they feel, though I rather like the books too. Follow me, Sera. I want to show you something."

"Who are your reading friends? You should send them by."

He isn't staying still. Ruse is gripping Adam's thumb and sticking a fat pink tongue out at Sera or maybe at Adam and looking at the desk and sort've looking squirmly like it would really like to crawl up a sleeve or something and Adam waits for Sera to get off his desk, or maybe helps her make that decision, and then he leads her to the stairs. That's the idea. To the stairs, and up the stairs, and onto the second floor, annnnd...

And.

---

Dice @ 4:40PM

[-_-]

Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 8) ( success x 1 ) VALID

Serafíne

"Oh my fucking god - " Sera exclaims aloud when Ruse breaks into that hump-bunched run, which is not precisely bouncy but somehow bounding, like a teeter totter or some strangely awkward machinery except that there is nothing awkward about the sinous elegance of the little beast, and she is so enthralled that she does not see and hardly notices the shadow of temper that Adam leashes or his protective shooing over the contents of his desk. Wasn't the desk there when she wanted to sit? Isn't that the sort of thing that the universe does for her?

Yes and yes and a thousand times yes.

"How does it DO that?"

She means the run, and when Ruse flops over on his back Sera dares to go for the belly and gets mock-battled or perhaps even battled, battle-burrowed, charged.

Charmed, smiling, gleaming with an unself-conscious openness Sera is not much following the skein of conversation until Adam says his name, and then at last she glances up from the ferret to met Adam's eyes. "Alright Just-Adam,"

- a sly edge to her mouth, as she leans toward Ruse, holding out her fingers again.

Wiggling them and then waggling them.

"Maybe I will send my reading friends by. I don't suppose you have anything in Egyptian or whatever they speak there? Fucking Roman or something?"

Without much specific comment, Sera slips (at last!) off the desk, and follows Adam towards, and then up, the stairs.

Trusting creature, isn't she?

Either that or a goddamned badass.

Strangers [Unfinished]

Sid

The six block stretch of Santa Fe lined with art galleries, coffee shops, bars, tattoo parlors, and such and so forth and so on is experiencing a moderate amount of foot traffic tonight. That'll happen when the temperatures rise enough that even the shaded patches of ice begin to melt down, going from a thumbs' width in thickness to, ah, fractionally less than that. It's nice out, is what that means. The sky is clear and there are people in their winter coats and people in t-shirts and jeans and Crocs. Takes all kinds in Denver.

As the sun throws out its last golden ray over the ridge of the Rockies, all those kinds are rising in all kinds of ways. For Sid's part, she's wandering as she sometimes wanders. Not all that long ago she parked her old blue and cream (and rust and cracked) truck along the curb to see a classmate's drawing hanging on the wall of that classmate's friend's friend's uncle's ex-roommate's gallery. She was very proud, the classmate.

It's a little later now and Sid's managed to slip free of the herd in order to find something to eat. A breakfast house fills the cracks between one large gallery and two much smaller ones stacked atop each other. It's a small place, a greasy spoon place, and a greasy everything else place. The walls are a greasy yellow, the wood a waxy, greasy looking blond pine. The seats are old and cracked green vinyl, but hey, no one's coming here for the color scheme and the décor. They're coming for heaps of eggs and piles of bacon.

Sid finds herself a seat in the corner, her left arm against the glass front window so she can see...everything really, while she waits for a server to notice her.

[and awareness because it's Sid]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )

Serafíne

Sid feels Serafíne rather a long way off. From blocks away, even - through those icy sidewalks and the wan glory of that setting sun, which is arctic in its brilliance tonight. Sera, who is both undeniable and hard to ignore, both instinctual and a bit overwhelming; who lights one up right through the gut, the base of the spine, and consumes attention, because where else would you look when she's in the room. Feels Sera before she sees her, which is still rather a long way off - half-way down the sidewalk, full of Denver's strange combination of sandal-clad hopefuls and bundled-up snowbunnies and everything in between.

Nevermind the ice, Sera's wearing thigh-high boots with four and a half-inch heels and has an arm slipped around her closest companion (who is Dan, for the record)'s midsection and some tiny little leather skirt made almost entirely out of straps and buckles and fishnets beneath it down to the thigh-high boots and a cropped white t-shirt over a lacy black halter-thing over a sherpa-lined leather jacket that has been tagged and scored and covered in pins that were removed and replaced until it seems more tattered than held-together and that, by the way, is deliberate. That coat is open to the bright chill and shows bare-fucking-skin and she is wearing gloves, Sera, but they are fingerless white lace gloves, and her long, fine fingers are a bit red from the cold but she's lighting up a cigarette and tucking her head against Dan's shoulder while someone behind her leans forward to insert something and there's laughing movement out from then like an opening hinge and she's turning, see, on a low-pivot to glance behind her when she feels something or sees something or something changes, beneath her skin.

Something alert or different at the least. Something about doorways and hallways and cavemouths. And she looks up from half-way down the block and looks right at Sid through the window of that greasy spoon, a look full of a surprising steadiness, a remarkable directness, that piece of her she refuses to ever really turn off.

And smiles.

And waves, with that cigarette (the dark-rolled kretek) in her left hand.

And takes another drag and looks like a fucking painting.

Then leans back over to Dan and drops her mouth to his shoulder and mutters something onto his own leather coat and rests the bridge of her nose against the flat line of his upper arm, until he looks up too and murmurs something to her and then behind them.

And lo, the two of them are redirected when they start walking again, aren't they - right to the Swift Breakfast House. They pause outside the door long enough for Sera and Dan to trade off drags on Sera's clove cigarette and then she hands the remainder of the smoke off to someone else in the general crowd they had inhabited, who is taking it off elsewhere or hanging out outside, it hardly fucking matters.

The front door opens.

There is a goddamned bell and it jingles and Sera peels herself away from Dan or Dan peels himself away from Sera.

He's headed to the counter.

Sera's headed Sid's way.

Sid has 4.52 seconds to get away if she wants to make an escape.

Maybe less than that, though. Sera is, after all, a Seer.

Sid

Sid has longer than 4.52 seconds to get away. She has from the moment she senses that particular resonance - visceral, enthralling, and something else, something new that changes the shade from Definitely Sera to Hm Maybe Probably Sera? - blocks and blocks away. And maybe she thinks about it. Maybe she considers Christmas and the strange stiffness in the Cultist and the odd stand-offishness of her other Awakened guest, and she thinks about making her escape again. She hadn't stayed much longer after Sera left the room, it was too strange, too weird, too different. That wasn't the room where Sid and Jim batted at each other while making smoothies. It wasn't where Sera sat perched on the edge of the table near to Dan while the four of them discussed a demon. It was a different, foreign place. So Sid left.

Sid does not leave the Swift Breakfast House when she senses what could maybe possibly perhaps be Serafíne. She's sitting next to the window still, a plain dark blue sweatshirt hanging from the back of her chair, her messenger bag tucked beneath her seat. When Sera spots her, smiles, waves, Sid is sitting with her chin cupped against the heel of her hand, the corner of her mouth raised in a slight half-smile. The hand propping up her head shifts, her fingers wiggle in a return wave, and while Sera and Dan make their eventual way inside, Sid sits up. Her hair is down as it nearly always is, waves of red spilling over her shoulders. She's wearing a dark blue sweater with a neckline so wide her left shoulder is exposed along with the black strap of her bra, the dark colors making her fair skin appear much paler. She, too, is wearing a skirt, one that probably falls a few inches above her knees. Brown leather boots that go up to her pale knees, with thick straps that close over her ankles, complete the look.

She lifts her chin when the bell jingles and Sera-and-Dan enter. Sid knows without having to watch that they will peel apart and that Dan will go to the counter. There is a glass of water before Sid's hands on the table, next to a folded, laminated menu.

"Hey," she says, the greeting quiet. "Are you here for eggs and bacon, too?"

Serafíne

"Naw," this is Sera who feels like Sera yes and also something: new. New-and-different. So not merely Sera or perhaps not even Sera except that look is brief and whole and bruising and god that looks like her, doesn't it. Full of that awkwardness of Christmas and honestly the awkwardness of the months that came before and the fact of winter and also eggs. Eggs and bacon.

Well, no. There are neither eggs nor bacon in Sera's eyes and who can read someone else that quickly through all the layers of their skin?

The quirk of her little half-smile half-smirk and awareness of solace and the awareness of pain and the awareness of Sid's hand cupped around her chin and her elbow resting on the table. The solidity of that. The immediacy of that.

"Not eggs and bacon," she shucks off her leather coat and beneath it that cut-off t-shirt, which is half-a-rainbow rhinocerus and half, well, the lean line of her torso, the teasing suggestion of her bra because: white cotton, black bra, and also cut-off. A hint of Sera's ink, something scrawled down her flank, another thing-or-three closer to hidden beneath black lace. The tats on her arms and her hands and on and on. Sera is wearing a small ring of beaten gold on her right index finger and an armful of cheap plastic bangles from the dollar store on her left wrist.

And she's sliding into the booth across from side, and she's picking up a menu and she's opening it but not really looking down at it. Probably doesn't care what she eats, Sera.

"I'm here for you. Hi Sid.

"It's been a while."

Sid

Sid doesn't wear jewelry. There are markings on her, sure. The sleeve of her sweater is pushed up, but her left arm is angled and at rest. The tough, raised line of scar tissue can't be seen. The dark lines seared into the skin of her wrist are hidden until she gestures, but Sid isn't one for excessive gesticulation. Her movements are conservative.

Even now. She scarcely moved a muscle before she saw Sera through the window, and since she sat up she's scarcley moved again. Her dark eyes lifted, her chin raising slightly so that when she does look up she continues to look through the frames of her dark glasses. And when Sera began sliding into the seat opposite her, Sid's hands remained resting on top of the table, resting between them.

"Me," she says, doesn't ask, the corner of her bottom lip tucking between her teeth briefly before her smile widens slightly, releasing it. "I guess it has. You seem like you're doing better." Last time they were both still recovering from illness, though Sera looked the worse for it. She'd still been recovering from a fast when the Hydra virus was forced on her, and she spent her days wasting away further from that. Sid had been thinner, too. Perhaps she's back to normal again, or as close to normal as is possible for her to be.

Serafíne

See, Sera is a fucking dramatic gesture. The way she shucks her coat, the way sliiiiiides into the bench seat, the way bracelets clatter across the plane of her wrist, the way she tosses her head back and allows it to loll on the axis of her spine, as if she were already drunk and high and feeling some sliding golden light all serpentine up her spine and

she does look so very much better. Healthier or whatever you want to call it. No longer ravaged physically but worse: psychologically. Just devoured, just spent.

Just consumed and not in any of the ways she always wants to be consumed.

But look, a sort of softness in her eyes that feels like a kind of quickening, and is hard to measure or note because it appears and disappears and turns over beneath the surface and some absolutely native part of Sera absolutely hates this part of the conservation.

Sid says, you seem like you're doing better and Sera, what the living fuck can she say to that; there's that in her eyes too, the steely and countermanding grace of it.

"I guess I am." Which is true and false and so many things at once: hollow and full and a half-hundred other contradictions we cannot be bothered to mention.

And more. Here is something she doesn't say: You look better, too.

Sera draws in a deep breath and glances at the window and then out the window, at the street. Strangers walking by and her own image superimposed on them, luminous, liminal. Between.

"I didn't wanna see you for a long-ass time, you know?"

Sid

It really has been a long-ass time since they saw each other. Really, really saw each other. The last time they saw each other properly was...fuck, October? The night they met a man in a restaurant just miles from here. They've seen each other since, but not really. Those were moments. When was the last time? That time with the red velvet cake and the alcoholic floats?

A long god damned time ago.

They're both looking better and the conversation is chit chat, the thing that acquaintances do when they see each other. Sid says words to fill the void because there is a void to fill and she can see that Sera hates it. This place where they are now? Sid's not terribly fond of it, either.

There is a slow lowering of her lashes and Sid's gaze lowers with it, tips away from the brightness of Sera. Looking at them, it's hard to see if there's a common ground, a common denominator, a common thing that has them sitting at a table together in a breakfast restaurant in a place of art and beautiful and terrible things.

Sid, still looking down, says, "I do." Sucks in a breath and her chin lifts, her gaze drifting to their reflection - faint now but growing more distinct as the world outside the window darkens through Denver's truncated dusk toward evening. "I didn't want to see you, either." Finally those dark eyes lift again, her head still angled so her face is away, but her eyes are on Sera. "But you wanted to see me now?"

Serafíne

There is something winged in the arching grace of the glance Sera sends Sid's way, then and there. The question tips the honed edge of something both bitter and sweet into her, and it is like stepping diving through a darkened window. With no idea what is on the other side. The answer is a complicated, indissoluble mixture of yes and no and a half-dozen other things to which Sera does not give voice because she offers Sid a simmering smile that says them all: both yes and no and I did it anyway, didn't I because even a creature like Sera who gives in to every whim and desire of her tattered fucking soul knows that sometimes you are many things at once, reluctant and needful and bright. Sometimes you do something you don't want to do because you want the thing on the other side of the hard and difficult thing more.

So, that sort of a yes smile and a no smile and a raw smile and a wry smile and a quiet, lilting lift of her narrow chin.

"Why didn't you want to see me?"

Steady, steady, her drowning eyes.

Sid

Sera is not the only one who straddles two sides of an infinity of answers, yes and no and all the shades in between, she's just the one who feels like it. Sid lifts her own chin, tilts her head so that it faces the same direction her eyes are looking. And she is also yes, but also no, and a lot more I did it anyway, too.

Somewhere just beneath the surface, or perhaps a little further (and further) down, is a kindred feeling, the barest hint of something connected, something similar. Sameness. Ready, waiting, waiting, waiting. For the right moment? For the right step in the right direction? Who knows. Maybe it's not down, but back, somewhere so far behind Sid it's been lost even to her rearview mirror.

Sera asks a question and Sid's lips part to answer, but she pauses, not because Sera's steadiness arrests her, but because. There are a hundred ways to answer that question, and not all of them are true. "It's...it was. Complicated." Her shoulder, the one still covered in soft, dark blue fabric, lifts and falls in a shrug. "It doesn't matter anymore."

Serafíne

"I don't know," Sera returns, a bit wry and a bit raw and a bit aware. Of her body and her breath and the permanence and impermanence of all things. A flicker of a glance; drawn and taut from the window to Sid's eyes, to Sid's curving shoulder, to her mouth again. "I think it does matter."

And just like that, some part of Sera believes that that is true. Knows it.

"If you don't wanna tell me, that's one thing. A different thing."

Maybe even something Sera can live with.

"But I'd like to know."

Sid

"No," replies Sid "it really doesn't," a shadow forming between her dark brows as she looks across at Sera. It's a passing thing, that shadow, there and then Sid is breathing in deep through her nose, letting that breath out on a quiet sigh. Because she remembers that this is Sera, and sometimes Sera pushes, sometimes hard enough to shove Sid away from her. And Sid doesn't want to be shoved away again.

"There are things in the past that matter, because they're bound to come up again," she continues. "And there are things that don't matter, Sera, because they're done and over." She slides her hand forward, her left hand, slides it so it's on the table between them, between their menus and past Sid's glass of water, closer to Sera's side. And there she twists her arm, turns her hand over so the palm is up, her fingers splayed. An offering.

"You're my friend and that's what matters."

Serafíne

Sera breathes out, this long, slow breath through her nostrils. The glance she gives Sid is really rather quiet and a bit opaque, but only because there is something measured to it. Something considering, something thoughtful, something withheld -

- and something lovely.

Sera's eyes - dark-rimmed, reflective, blue - slip from Sid's eyes to that hand half-way across the table. And Sera takes Sid's hand, of course she takes Sid's hand, Sid's amazingly warm, incredible fucking hand and folds her own right hand around it. The ring on her index finger and the ink on the flat edge of her palm and more ink at the wrist but not sharkscissors, sharkscissors is on her left hand, see?

Wraps her own hand around Sid's, and -

smiles, this haunting, lovely, heartbreaking smile.

"Sid, you're my friend. That's why it matters."

A brief hitch of her shoulders.

"I can tell you why I didn't want to see you.

"If you wanna know."

Sid

Sera takes her hand and Sid wraps her fingers around those of the Ecstatic. And yes, Sid's hands are warm, full of a magic that exists in her blood, runs through her veins and radiates outward, giving life to certain Patterns. In the past they've also given a sense of comfort beyond what the Verbena mage had been capable of giving. Those times are rare now, and become rarer as more and more of those internal locks come undone. Releasing her own inner warmth, the empowerment of her own presence, steady and still and strong, radiating as surely as the warmth radiates from her skin. To the point now where Sid is still quiet, that is not a thing that will likely change in this life, but she is steadfast.

She gives Sera's hand a squeeze, looking at their joined hands thoughtfully a moment before looking up into those blue eyes.

"I don't," she answers. Wanna know, she means, because that is who Sid is. She does not want to know the secrets of others, does not want to pry them open to look inside and scoop out their mysteries, laying them bare. Which is where they differ. "But I'll listen if you want to tell me."

Serafíne

Sera is a fucking hedonist, and it's easy for her to get lost in the warmth of Sid's hand. Sera's own hand is pretty chilly; she's just come in from the cold, after all, and she's skinny and, even in the midst of winter, wears far too little clothing, so: warmth. The fascinating, ambient pull of it, and Sera remembers the first bloom of that fascination last summer - suddenly and entirely, remembers it - Justin and Sid and Sid and Justin, and the memory chases itself across her clear features, her flat brows drawing together, her quick mouth going a bit softer as she loosens her hand and thoughtfully traces the tip of her index finger over the radiant warmth of Sid's palm.

The gesture is as intimate and as familiar as a lover's, but there's a certain hint of distance in Sera's eyes, then. This hint of horizons and vistas and the seams of things, where the sky is stitched into the ground.

Sera glances up then; away from Sid, across the diner toward Dan where he sits at the counter, forearms slung over the lip, laughing with the waiter tending the counter as the guy overturns Dan's coffee mug and pours him a cup from the pot he's carrying around like a proper hash-joint food server.

Sera looks back at Sid then; her smile does not precisely fade, though it does shift to something poignant and more a bit charged with memories, which are not precisely good.

And, quite thoughtfully, Sera unlaces their laced hands. Drops her eyes to the table between them and pulls her own hand back. The tattoos she does not remember scribing into her skin an unfocused scrawl of blackwork against her flesh. Sid's shadow in the formica tabletop no more than a suggestion between them. The noise rising from the dining room a kind of washing, pleasant hum. "If you don't want to know," Sera says, with quiet little shrug. "I don't really wanna talk about it."

Sera's smile is rather poignant. She can feel the weight of unspoken words on her tongue.

"But if you wanted to know, Sid - " A glance back. Sera is a little bit drunk but surprisingly clear-eyed. Sera is magic. One of the girl's in the next booth over feels, for some reason, that she is on the verge of something know, though she hardly knows what, knows it in her gut. That's just the way the universe bends around Serafíne, now.

Sid

[awarepathy!]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Serafíne

The immediate surface is this sort of awkward melancholy. Sera thinks it is important to talk about why they didn't want to see each other; ignoring it means that it will always be there. She was pretty ready to lay herself open in a way that is remarkably painful for her, as she is actually quite private, but when when Sid that she didn't want to know, that arrested her. Because want and desire and intentionality also matter to her.

So: sad. Painful. Distant. Strange. Affectionate. But distant for sure; more so than since she walked into the diner.

Serafíne

(That was the empathy reading!)

Sid

Sid does not pull away when Sera begins tracing her finger along the warm planes of her upraised palm. They've been close before, held hands, hugged. Sid has held Sera close before, tucked in against that warmth of life that runs through her veins and radiates from her as though she were not a human but a hearth-warmed stone come to life. She feels like life, too. Like a frantic, desperate, ohno ohno ohno scramble for survival and the bliss, the high of life, of living, these feelings twined together and she feels stronger than she did before the Hydra virus tried to claim her life. Looks it, too.

When Sera untwines her hand from Sid's, Sid does not immediately pull hers back toward her. It's not until Sera speaks, until she smiles in that sad and moving way, that Sid returns herself to her side of the table. She withdraws, folds her hands together on the tabletop, and studies the Ecstatic across from her. And it seems to her that almost none of the people she knows by that Tradition are living up to the name these days. Not Sera at least. Not Lena, either. Sadness and heartache and hardship has touched them all too roughly, has settled in too deep.

Sid withdraws because she knows Sera well enough and she can see it in her now. She knows that even if she wants to mean it, she doesn't.

Taking in a slow, long breath, she releases it just as slowly, letting it take just as long. There are so many things that she could say, point out, discuss. What do they matter, though?

"Tell me."

Serafíne

Sera pulls herself back in the booth until she can just sort of lounge there, her shoulders and spine against the cool glass, her hair loose over her shoulders and the frame of the booth. One forearm on the tabletop, tracing the impressionistic flecks in the formica with a thoughtless and careless hand.

"I'm phobic of hospitals." Usually Sera says that she hates them, which is a sort of living lie. This is the first time Sera's said in plainly in - well - ever, and she says it quietly and painful and she mimics, consciously or unconsciously, Hawksley's phrasing when he explained quietly and clearly to the nurse tending her in the Emergency Room in the aftermath of her seeking precisely why she woke up and ripped out her IV and tore away all the fucking monitors attached to her body or glued onto her skin. And she finds that it might make her ache, in very strange places in her very strange body, but it does not hurt and it does not wound. There is her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she measures out the weight of the words; thinks them and thinks them and says them, aloud.

Strange.

The things we fear.

Sera is not looking at Sid right now; no, her gaze has swung back up, across the diner to Dan, who is sipping at his coffee and checking his phone and glancing back at her, now and then. Aware of her; alert to her; alive to her.

"I spent a lot of time in and out of rehab when I was a teenager. Being locked up sucks, you know? So, all of that together, that place fucked me up."

Sera's voice is really rather conversational. Which is also strange, but she's not returning to the torment and the torture, the graphic hallucinations of her own death-to-be, the imprisonment, the ongoing and regular violation of her body and her personhood she experienced while suffering through the illness Sid cured. That isn't this sort of confessional.

She's returning to the aftermath.

And the aftermath was surprisingly quiet.

It was Sera curled up in bed, sleeping. Hawksley beside her with a book in hand. Or Dan or even Dee, sitting with her or sprawled in her armchair in the shadow of the windows overlooking her garden.

"I didn't go out. We didn't throw parties or any of that shit. I mean, Christmas was really the first one. I spent alot of my goddamned time drinking tea and looking out the window. Which probably had everyone in my fucking life wondering what the hell was wrong with me, but it seemed to me - and I never really thought about it, because I don't think about fucking anything - that if I started slipping my skin, I didn't know that I'd ever want to come back to it.

"Why the fuck would you wanna be here when you can be everywhere.

"Which is a different story, I guess."

Sera offers a little shrug, this wry and really rather elegant surrender, with a slow-spreading grin because wry and elegant surrender are not really her cup of whiskey-spiked Darjeeling, are they?

"I didn't wanna see you. I didn't wanna see anyone.

"Except that's not really true. I didn't run and hide when Hawksley came by to check on me. I went to chantry a couple of times, too, and at first I didn't wanna see any fucking one. Grace and then Pan, I don't know. It was okay. It wasn't terrible. Maybe I wanted to see the people who wanted to see me. I told Grace I didn't have the energy for any of that shit with the movie, and I didn't, so I didn't touch it, because I coundn't touch it. I wasn't even doing magic. Or anything that could lead to magic, like fucking, or more than two shots of tequila, or any tea except Darjeeling.

"I didn't wanna see any strangers, I didn't wanna see anyone new. I didn't wanna see anyone who wasn't willing to knock on my door.

"I don't know, Sid. It's hard. It's shitty because I was fucking avoiding you, and I don't fucking know if that's because I thought you'd need me when there wasn't any shit anywhere I could give, or if it's because - "

Sera arrests herself, here. Inhales through the nose. Exhales.

There's only so much self-examination Sera is capable of. The truth is she didn't see Sid because she didn't want to see Sid.

"It took me a long fucking time. And by then, it was starting to be a habit. Habits get comfortable. You make a groove, you know?

"You settle in. I fucking hate them."

Sid

Sera opens up and Sid listens quietly. She's always been a good listener, whether she intended to be or not. She can be patient while someone else unburdens themselves, but she will not press them into it. She will not question and prod, or put someone under a microscope to be dissected. Sera starts and she does not find herself interrupted until the very end.

But she is not still while Sera opens up. Sera is phobic of hospitals and that causes a shadow to form between Sid's red brows and the line of her mouth to tighten. She looks neither surprised nor troubled that Sera didn't want to see anyone. Which of them did, really? They all came out of that facility a little quieter, a little tighter, a little more withdrawn. They all knew seemingly by instinct that they needed time to recover away from each other and in their own ways. For just a moment she looks bewildered at the suggestion she might have wanted anything from Sera when Sera had nothing to give. It passes, because ah. Well.

When Sera's finished Sid is quiet for a long, long time, eyes lowered to the glossy tabletop just in front of the Cultist.

Finally, after what feels like an age but lasts only seconds, Sid shifts where she sits. Her spine takes a curve, shoulders slanting as her head leans slightly to one side. She draws a breath, even parts her lips as though to say something, but there's another pause. A hesitation. Sid was once afraid of people, strangers, supposed friends, everyone. Over the years this fear intensified, becoming something like shyness. Words drew attention to her and attention could mean...But she's changed. That fear will always be a part of her life, but it is no longer a shyness that arrests her words but a thoughtfulness. She considers her words before she says them.

That pause is only a beat, a breath, before it becomes a sigh. Whatever thoughts might be lurking in the shadows of her brown eyes, Sid relaxes. Because they both know Sera didn't avoid Sid because she thought Sid might take from Sera when she had nothing in her to give. This is Sid, who is stronger than those who first met her in Denver give her credit for. She doesn't lean on anyone who can't support the weight, only those who can. And it's not because Sid didn't come calling, because she did in a way. She texted Sera at some time that she forgets, November maybe or even early in December, asking about a movie. Sera suggested an art crawl. In the end neither happened.

"Is that why you came in here?" she asks finally. "Just to break a habit?"

Serafíne

There are so may ways that we are formed and so many ways that we are forged and here they are in a greasy spoon, right? turned hip. Some day and hour agreed-upon by the masses, who never seem capable of recalling all the many ways in which they can opt-out of this daily grind.

Sera has her right arm braced on the tabletop and her back to the windowed view of the street and she feels all strange and terribly confessional even if Sid hears no more than a piece of it all. The smallest slice. The why-I-didn't-wanna-see-you, which Sera herself hardly recognized until she started speaking it aloud. Words really aren't her medium, not words like these anyway, taking-stock and giving-account and figuring-out sort of words, the sort that go with thing and causation. Sera likes poetry. Whatever it is, she just wants to feel it all quick right now to her slender bones.

So, yeah. She's looking away there at the end, an odd and oddly quiet expression on her face. Thoughtful,

on the verge of -

but isn't that also what she feels like now; the way she bends the world around her. Always on the verge -

Sid speaks. Asks a question, and truthfully the question Sid asks feels, well, as if Sid is unwinding and pulling oakum out of a very different sort of rope. Sera glances up, over. This gesture almost abrupt, like she's surfacing from somewhere beneath her own skin. Meets Sid's eyes again, and exhales, sharply. That brief question is cryptic, really. Hard to read the inflection on the just and Sera who reads everything and reads everyone and was made to feel like that rather than anything so base and course and intention as knowing still knows that she is somehow too tender, just now, to let herself See.

So she doesn't Look.

Just could be just or just or even JUST or merely just.

Sera holds Sid's gaze for a moment. There is in her a kind of softening, which is not without its own risks. A sort of advanced forgiveness of refusals and misunderstandings; a slip of rue, perhaps even a very un-Sera-like resignation.

"Naw," she says. "I wanted to say hi."

Parole. [Unfinished]

Fr. Echeverría

Keep dreaming, Denver

Serafíne

There is a cave and there is a wild-haired and wild-eyed woman whom Sera has known since her awakening, whom she has never seen before. And that woman is standing in the midst of sacrificial smoke and her feet are bare over sacrificial bones in an oracle's graffiti-laced grotto and she has a voice like thunder beyond the horizon and she has a mouth like rain and she wears flames the way other women wear silk. Sera would like to become part of the storm part of the sky, part of the scissoring strikes of lightning flashing down to the churning sea and she is reaching and reaching but she does not know how to climb that high. There is a cave and a mouth and the sea below is black. They are dancing, whirling like dervishes, dark and sacred and cetripetal and she is going to be flung and before she can be flung, she jumps

Wednesday evening, Thursday evening - Sera does not know the day and she does not know the time except for the way it runs beneath her skin. It is: night and dark and very very cold in Denver this week. Not below-freezing cold. Below-zero cold. In weather like this evening turns up the goddamned heat and stays home, plugs in the electric heater, fills up that old creaky kerosene one. Turns on the oven and opens it up, if None of the Above work. The wind is furious and rattles the frames of the windows in the rectory. Maybe the priest who replaced Pan taped plastic over them in lieu of storm windows, or maybe he foud the storm windows, dusty, covered in cobwebs and dust, in some crawl space beneath the wooden house. Regardless: it is fucking cold and people put on layers and keep their heads down and put on practice, low-heeled, waterproof boots and walk carefully and the old ladies in the League of Mary stay home except on Sundays, because they are afraid of breaking a hip and won't risk it for daily mass or the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin, but God has expectations, doesn't he still have standards, aren't there some fucking laws, some goddamned requirements left in the world that cannot be and have not been and will not be waived?

But this is Sera out in this weather, and god knows what she's wearing. On her feet, on her body, how she's keeping her stupid ass from frostbite given her proclivities for baring flesh. Over/under the rattle of the windowpanes in the howling plains' wind late on a weeknight, a knock at his door. A ring of the bell. She only does that when she's sober, or mostly-sober. When she thinks perhaps that he still might actually be up.

He knows who it is because he can feel her; gut-wrenching, entrancing Serafíne. From the other side of the door, from the other side of the hall. And someone else, too - like a door, opening. Like a passageway, dark at both ends. Like that road Paul took too Damascus, excepting no one knows exactly where it ends.

Another knock, then. Let me in.

Serafíne

Wednesday evening, Thursday evening - Sera does not know the day and she does not know the time except for the way it runs beneath her skin. It is: night and dark and very very cold in Denver this week. Not below-freezing cold. Below-zero cold. In weather like this evening turns up the goddamned heat and stays home, plugs in the electric heater, fills up that old creaky kerosene one. Turns on the oven and opens it up, if None of the Above work. The wind is furious and rattles the frames of the windows in the rectory. Maybe the priest who replaced Pan taped plastic over them in lieu of storm windows, or maybe he foud the storm windows, dusty, covered in cobwebs and dust, in some crawl space beneath the wooden house. Regardless: it is fucking cold and people put on layers and keep their heads down and put on practice, low-heeled, waterproof boots and walk carefully and the old ladies in the League of Mary stay home except on Sundays, because they are afraid of breaking a hip and won't risk it for daily mass or the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin, but God has expectations, doesn't he still have standards, aren't there some fucking laws, some goddamned requirements left in the world that cannot be and have not been and will not be waived?

But this is Sera out in this weather, and god knows what she's wearing. On her feet, on her body, how she's keeping her stupid ass from frostbite given her proclivities for baring flesh. Over/under the rattle of the windowpanes in the howling plains' wind late on a weeknight, a knock at his door. A ring of the bell. She only does that when she's sober, or mostly-sober. When she thinks perhaps that he still might actually be up.

He knows who it is because he can feel her; gut-wrenching, entrancing Serafíne. From the other side of the door, from the other side of the hall. And someone else, too - like a door, opening. Like a passageway, dark at both ends. Like that road Paul took too Damascus, excepting no one knows exactly where it ends.

Another knock, then. Let me in.

Fr. Echeverría

No trace of Father Ruíz is left in this place.

She cannot feel Father Echeverría from down the street but that has less to do with the weather and more to do with the newness of his return. Two months convalescing and another two months out in the plains where he took up a room at a house only Rosa knew how to find. No new parishioners since he left but for the ones who followed Father Ruíz from his own congregation. They went back with him.

The church is like a lighthouse against a white shore. Thick clouds bouncing pink city lights back down to join the snow and everything is all lit up behind the flurries. Magic cannot compete against technology. Not when the one performing the magic calls it miracles. Faith is dying out even faster than magic.

Even in weather like this he doesn't lock the door when he's home.

Pan comes to the entryway in his stocking feet. He wears a sweater instead of cranking the heat. She has not been here since summertime. When he was heavier and did not wear a beard. It isn't sight that tells him who is out there but he hesitates all the same because something's changed about her.

"Ay, loquita, you gonna freeze out there!" he says as he bangs open the screen door and opens his arm to shepherd her inside. "¿Qué pasa contigo?"

Serafíne

She is gonna freeze out there. Okay even a Sera makes concessions to winter weather when the temperature drops this far: she's wrapped up in a very thick coat, black leather lined with shearling, lined again with a thick black hoodie with the hood pulled up over the crown of her head. That coat is pretty short, though. It covers her down to her ass. Beneath that: a short leather skirt, her usual goddamned fishnets, and a pair of thigh-high leather boots, with heels are are only slightly insane instead of truly mad.

There's a fading bruise on her right temple. The fading line of a fairly well-healed laceration that nevertheless still may scar.

"I wanted to see you," Sera says, shaking the snow off her hood, starting to unwind a black scarf printed with white-sugar-skulls, as she comes into the warmth and the light. She looks - and perhaps feels more than a little bit dislocated.

Feels that again as she comes inside the rectory for the first time since he left it. Sera breathes in sharply and turns back to Pan as he goes to close the door behind her, rises to her tiptoes as she steps back and rather into him.

"I wasn't gonna freeze," she is telling him as she unearths her frozen fingers from her freezing pockets and reaches up to grasp his jaw. Her thumbs on his cheeks, his fingers on his neck. Her skin is cold, freezing: the bright, sharp red of that earliest stage of go-inside-dummy-before-you-get-frostbite. She just holds his face like that for a half-minute, her thumbs on his bear, smiling at him, this strange and tremulous smile. "I knew you'd let me in."

Another man would be struck by the conviction that she was on the verge of kissing him. But he isn't another man, and she does not, after all, kiss him.

Just studies him, with this open tenderness that feels so - strange, expectant, bright.

Fr. Echeverría

Though her thin fingers bite like icicles when they find his flesh the priest does not wince away from her or even flinch. It's only a sensation and the sensation does not mean anything. Nothing worth flinching back from.

Half of a minute is a long time. He does not stand there for thirty seconds letting her touch his face in some silent communion while she gets her bearings. Sera always strikes him as having come unstuck from time. It has never bothered him. But she is still of this earth and her flesh is freezing so Pan reaches up after about three seconds and takes both her hands off of his jaws and holds them between his own.

His health is come back to him. Though he is not regaining the weight at the rate at which he lost it he does not cut a cadaverous figure stood all in black at the end of the day. Low lights on behind him but he was not in bed. It isn't that late even if it is dark enough to pass for late. February is a harsh month.

Though his hands are not warm as a Verbena's they promise to thaw her out. He snorts when she said she knew he'd let her in. He has never not let her in. Never made her leave even when she came into the place tripping or shaking or floating. Pan is a patient man.

"Well," he says. His eyes don't go down past her neckline. They never do. "I'm freezing just looking at you. Come sit down, I'll make you something to drink."

Serafíne

So, not half-a-minute in the foyer, her freezing hands cradling his face, looking up at him, changed and new and Sera all at once. When he takes her hands in his hands to warm her up she starts shaking but it isn't fear or anything like it. Sera doesn't know what it is. It feels like that tremors one develops when one comes in from the cold. When one's body remembers what it means to be warm. Except this is something else, that will come later, in a minute or five when he has made her tea and she has perhaps doused it with whiskey from her flask as she is wont to do.

Sera allows Pan to warm her hands and allows him to lead her really rather docilely for a fucking Sera to the kitchen but she does not allow him to let go of her. Turns one of those hands over in his so that they are holding hands as he leads her through the small, familiar corridors of the rectory. She does not let him go until he needs both hands to fill the kettle and put it on to boil.

Then she sits, ass on his table rather than in his chair, busying herself with unbuttoning and unzipping and generally, disrobing. The coat is shucked off and the hoodie unzipped and beneath it - well, he doesn't know. He doesn't look below her neck, but it is Sera so the outfit features her boobs. Seems to've been designed to remind the world that she has some.

Sera sits there fiddling with a gold ring on her right index finger, watching him move about, making tea, as if he were new-made. He is new-made to her new-self and there is something like a storm outside.

"Tell me about your awakening."

Fr. Echeverría

So he leads her into the kitchen by the hand. Not like a child and not like a lover. They're just holding hands. Jesus held hands with his disciples long ago. Men in distant countries will hold their male friends' hands as they walk down the street. Doesn't mean anything more than her laying her hands upon his cheek.

But they have to part eventually. And when she sits herself down on the table instead of at it he does not chastise her. He picks his battles. It's just a table.

Her request stills him only for a moment. Five words he hasn't heard since long before Sera met him. Since Sera was a little girl, like as not. She is only 23 years old. Pan is nearly twice that. Will be twice that in the spring.

He recovers to finish filling the kettle with water from the faucet and setting it on the burner.

"Why do you want to hear about that?" he asks.

Serafíne

Sera is still fiddling with her clothes or unwinding her scarf or something. The ring maybe, twisting it around her index finger. He takes up space that she does not take up, all in black. She watches his reflection in the glass of the window that overlooks the sink.

Outside, the city is dark.

"Why do you think?"

It is - strangely - not oppositional, when she asks him that. It is a question. Her voice curls up at the end. Her head is canted sidelong and her eyes are simmering on him.

Fr. Echeverría

The priest does not turn back towards her yet. He's gathering other things out of the cupboard. A jar with cloves and a jar with cinnamon sticks. Honey. Once he's gathered all these things he turns and leans back against the counter. Props the heels of his hands against it. By then she's asked a question.

His answer to her question:

"If I wanted to think I wouldn't've asked you, huh?" He's teasing her. "It ain't a nice story, and it's a long one. You sure you wanna hear it?"

Serafíne

The teasing makes her smile; even her smile feels new. New and strange and liminal. Like she's just trying it on. Like she hasn't remembered her name yet; like she does not need one, and may never need anything like it again.

Her cheeks curve with a closemouthed smile that is otherwise mostly compressed. Sera stops fiddling with her ring and instead leans back rather as he has, the heels of her palms resting on the table, her long-damn-looking legs swinging, leather creeking with the movement, clothes falling away from her body, revealing - reveling in - its inverse-curve.

"If you don't mind telling me." A brief pause, not precisely sharp. "Then I'm sure I wanna hear.

"If you mind - "

Fr. Echeverría

Suspenders must keep his goddamn pants from falling down now that they don't fit him around the middle anymore. Same color as his shirt but she can see the dull glint of the clips where they bite onto his waistband. Can imagine him shucking the bands off his shoulders as he sits to write a letter but not taking them off this early in the evening. Just in case he has to go back out.

Anyway.

"I don't mind."

Nothing else to do before the water starts to boil. He runs a hand through his mostly-silver hair and clears his throat. He's stood up at NA meetings and told this to newcomers. Sometimes he tells the story during sermons. Not High Mass. That's a ritual you don't improvise.

"When I was nineteen, yeah? I was dropped out, working on cars so Ana could go to school. She was finishing up her nursing degree. Rafael was... not even six months old. And I was shooting up heroin and smoking methamphetamine every day. I kept it from Ana, but she ain't stupid."

The water in the kettle is starting to rattle but it has not hit a boil yet.

"One of our friends from high school. Carlos. He was going to college same place as Ana. Commuting from Pueblo where we lived out to campus. They spent a lot of time together. Meth makes you paranoid, but I don't think the drugs had nothing to do with it. Got it into my head she was fooling around with Carlos. Carlos never did nothing to me, but one day he was there when I got home from work, and we got into an argument, and we started to fight. So I dragged him outside and I hit him until he stopped breathing."

Alright. He turns away not from shame but so he can finish what he's doing at the counter. A mug for his tea and a mug for whatever it is he's making for her. Either that bottle of whiskey has been there all this time or Father Ruíz left it. He puts a teabag into his mug and a generous splash of whiskey into her mug. Everything else he took out goes into the mug as well.

"I pled guilty to second-degree murder and the judge gave me twenty years out at Fremont. They got one ward out there for guys who ain't been convicted of sexual offenses and the other eighty, eighty-five percent of 'em, that's what they're in for. I lasted a little over a year, and then I hung myself in the shower."

There goes the kettle.

Serafíne

So, so. Sera's long, fine fingers are still sharply red from the cold. They are numb but just starting to ache as feeling returns. It is cold, it is damned cold, it is goddamned cold and she is a mad creature, isn't she? Here she is sitting on a celibate priest's kitchen table - a familiar priest, a familiar kitchen - legs swinging, eyes skimming down his black-clad body to find those bright points, the glint of metal at his waist, where the teeth of the clips bite home.

His hands. The black-threads through his silver hair. Sera can hear the familiarity with which he tells the story, which tells her that he has told it so very many times before. She is leaning back now, her hands braced on either side of her thighs, a compressed compassion shining in her eyes that he does not seem to require. She remembers when he was as close to broken as she had ever seen him, and even then he was merely bowed. Briefly bowed.

And she remembers, Sera, the warmth of his skin beneath her mouth.

She watches him.

She does not interrupt.

Pan

A body gets to be as old as his and the stories come out of time all have that blunted edge of memorization to them. The first few attempts are sharp and painful. If she had known him twenty years ago she would have had to wrench this story from him. Might not have heard if if she weren't sat at one of the NA meetings he had to attend.

They aren't at that point yet. At this point in the story he's telling Francisco Echeverría is dead or trying very hard to be dead. Pan however is stood in the kitchen Sera has infiltrated so many times and he's finishing making what will be a hot toddy by the time the spices are done mixing. He doesn't have lemon sliced up but a bowl of citrus fruits sit on the counter and he finds a paring knife to make a sliver to put into her drink before he gives it to her. Something to warm her hands and her insides.

Something to clean up while he finishes his story.

"An angel came to me," he says. "Tall black-clad thing, wings and a cloak, you know. Couldn't see Her face but I knew She was a She. And She said to me, 'Nunc non est tempus abire tibi.' I didn't know Latin. Had no idea about the words coming out of Her mouth. But I knew. I felt it. I had to stay on Earth, I had Work to do. No dying yet."

Everything is put away. Even the lemon has been bound up in plastic and tucked back in the fridge. He claps it shut and turns around to face her. Leans against the counter with his hands braced on either side against it. His tea isn't done steeping yet.

"Next thing I knew I was across the grounds, outside where I wasn't supposed to be. Guards thought I'd escaped and I let 'em think that. They put me in solitary confinement for the rest of the year. Had a lot of time to think in that cell."

This is the part where he tells Sleepers and Believers about how sitting alone in the dark he had a lot of time to think about all the wrongs he'd done and truly repent for his sins and come to the determination he was going to make things right and he was going to start in the cell.

No point blowing smoke up Sera's ass. He was alone in that cell. His Avatar didn't come back for him and that wasn't where his religious conversion happened either.

"I had a parole hearing seven years after that and they approved releasing me early on the grounds that I'd been a model prisoner. I was out six months later. Twenty-eight years old and I was like 'Well what I'm supposed to do now? I killed somebody, ain't nobody want nothing to do with me, I'm not gonna find no job, why I told the parole board all that stuff about being reformed and being ready to go home and shit? I ain't got no home.' Went back to Pueblo, started going to NA meetings once a week. Met a woman named Sister Ruth one of my first nights going. She was an Adept of the Chorus and a pastor at a church that burnt down before the War ended."

Oh shit. His tea's going to burn. Pan draws a lugubrious breath and pushes himself off the counter to fish the bag out the mug. Squeezes out the excess water before he tosses it in the rubbish bin beneath the sink.

"I'll tell you about Sister Ruth some other time. That's another long story."

Sera is not yet crying but her eyes are shining, and he can hear her reaction in the pattern of her breathing. A sharp, punctuate inhale.

There will be silence. Serafíne does not interrupt him. She allows the moments to settle into their grainy texture. She listens to the kettle, whistling in the kitchen. She feels the dry, wooshing warmth in the air as somewhere in the basement, the old furnace kicks on.

Serafíne

Sera accepts the toddy and there is still that strangely quiet grace to her, which makes her feel like some seam is about to come undone. She takes the mug from his hands, looking up at him, so attentive, and wraps her bright red fingers around the fired clay and bends over and inhales. The whiskey. The spices. The hot steam from the near-boiling water, that little slice of lemon.

Her reflection strange in the water. The priest moving familiarly around the kitchen, the motions of making tea and cleaning up quite nearly rote, quite nearly ritual, especially in this space that is beginning to remember his light.

And maybe there are places even in the rote telling of a time-long-passed and a story often-told: in pieces, in piecemeal - maybe there are places where Sera, watching Pan, aches even if he no longer does. Where the corded, blunted memories of what-he-did and what-he-suffered open up in her rather differently than they do in his telling.

Sera sips her toddy; and oh it does warm her, and she swings her legs and glances at the priest, and then the old cabinets, plywood or maybe painted metal given the age and the era of the house, and then back at the priest. Nods when he tells her that he will tell her the story of Sister Ruth another time. She trusts him, Sera, so implicitly it could break her heart.

"Have you seen your angel since?"

Pan

Serafíne has a way of living in the moment as if it's the only one she has and he has never told her this but if he did not respect that she has to know the priest would have said something by now. Maybe she has heard stories from the others about his methods of correcting behavior that he does not appreciate or condone. Maybe they are all too afraid of him to make mention of it or haven't noticed when he has spoken up about habits that could bring ruin down upon the rest of them.

This is not his life. It never has been. His life ought to have ended in a prison shower before many of them were even born but his life doesn't just belong to him. Something bigger than him stepped in before he could asphyxiate. Threw him outside of the gray walls and the double-locked doors and gave him the only real chance he ever had.

He hasn't mentioned parents or siblings. She's met his son and the mother of his son. A reason he didn't mention his birth family and a reason Ana and Pan keep their distance from each other now. A reason Rafael was the one everyone looked towards and leaned on when it was his father lain half-dead in a hospital bed over the summer.

The notion of everything happening for a reason is one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith. God wants people to help Pan. God wants people around Pan. God doesn't want Pan to die just yet. Even sent a Euthanatos to his bedside. To Sera's home.

So: she drinks her drink and she lets it warm her chill-red hands and she asks a simple question after a story that almost made her cry though that was not the point of the story.

"Yes," he says. "The first time was right after we buried Ruth. I was angry, and I didn't want nothing to do with any of this, and she found me. Second time was maybe five years ago. I went looking for her that time. I'm gonna go find her again soon. I think it's about time."

Serafíne

Sera can taste the strangeness of her new self on her tongue. She can feel the moments slipping by against the roof of her mouth, each pendulum swing of her legs, which are stupidly, foolishly bare given the bright and bitter cold outside, but that is how she is and what she is and she is here now: warming.

"Mine wasn't an angel." Sera's voice is a velvet ribbon, low tonight, and rich, and a bit hoarse from the cold, warming from the whiskey. Doesn't she sound like whiskey, too. Whiskey and cigarettes that she inhales as if she didn't need any fucking boring shit like oxygen to survive. And she's biting her lower lip and looking at him, and her legs keep swinging, swinging, swinging.

"I didn't go looking for her. I guess she was looking for me. I didn't even remember her 'til I saw her again half-way across the fucking bar after we finished our set. One bare breast. Eyes like the edge of a storm. You know? How they roll in over the plains.

"Once I saw her, I couldn't let the idea of her go. She started playing hard to get, all elusive. I looked for her everywhere in the bar.

"I kissed her when I found her. She tasted like lightning." A brief and rather breathless little smile, which is still limned by the gleam of the unshed tears in her eyes. "Scorched my lungs."

A little bit far away, Sera brings the toddy to her mouth. Just inhales, and then takes another steaming sip and glances away from him. The fridge; looking for that postcard. That snapshot. That evidence of life beyond his vows.

"Your angel and my - " here Sera breathes out, half a smile, half a laugh. She doesn't have a name for the woman inside her. The shape of her soul. That silence stands in.

"Do you think they come from the same place?"